Date: 01/20/07 (Web Development)    Keywords: oscommerce, database

I am working on a design for an e-commerce site. Currently my company uses a bastardized version of osCommerce. It's very broken, thanks to many developers/contractors that we used prior to my hiring, we want to fix out commerce site, but do not want to use osCommerce due to many limitations that we have run into with our business model.

That said, I am working on the database schema for the site, and am working on the administrative part of the site first. Basically the ability to create products/categories, edit order data, and create new administrative users. What I am kind of stuck on is the best way to handle admin user permissions.

I've thought of 3 methods to do this.

1. Create a list of actions that can be done, and create a map and map them to the users.


2. Create a list of user groups and allow admin users be mapped to the group.


3. Create a list of actions that can be done and allow them to be mapped to the groups, and allow those groups be mapped to the users.

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/webdev/385056.html